Maybe you’ve noticed that Google’s Gemini has been making gains on ChatGPT lately. Of all its recent impressive improvements, one of the lesser-sung features – at least in AI for Ed circles – is its much enhanced context window.
The context window is essentially how much text the AI can ‘remember’, and work with. Google’s next model boasts one million characters of this memory, leaving other models – which count their own in the hundreds of thousands – in the dust. It blows open the possibilities for a particular kind of AI task: working with long texts.
Language learners make use of all kinds of texts, of course. But one particularly unwieldy (although hugely useful) type where this new feature could help is the exam spec.
Exam Spec Crunching with AI
Language exam specs are roadmaps to qualifications, listing the knowledge and skills students need to demonstrate linguistic competency. But they have a lot of fine detail that can bog us down.
As a content creator, one thing that challenges me is teasing out this detail into some kind of meaningful arrangement for student activities. There is a mass of vocab data in there. And as systematic as it is, abstract lists of connectives, temporal adverbs and helper verbs don’t make for very student-friendly lesson material.
With a massive text cruncher like Gemini, they are a lot easier to process. Just drag in your spec PDF (I’ve been playing around with the new AQA GCSE German doc), and tease out the material in a more useful format for planning:
Additionally, it can help in creating resources that cover all bases:
With a long textual memory, it’s even possible to interrogate the spec after you’ve uploaded it. That’s literally just asking questions of the document itself – and, with that bigger window, getting answers that don’t overlook half the content:
Supersized Context Window – Playing Soon at an AI Near You!
For sure, you can use these techniques on existing platforms straight away. However, due to the smaller context window, results might not always be 100% reliable (although it’s always fun trying!). For the new Google magic, we’ll have to wait just a little longer.
But from the initial signs, it definitely looks worth the wait!
Gemini’s new supersized context window is available only in a limited released currently, and only via its AI Studio playground. Expect to see it coming to Gemini Advanced very soon!